Respecting Our Elders

I drove to Durham today (!!!) to meet an 'Age UK' group of LGBT elders. In some ways it was to be a bit of a dress rehearsal for the event we're doing tomorrow to drum up contributions for the online LGBT archive we're developing, but there was no way of really knowing what the group would want to do so we piled everything into the car to be ready for anything.

They were an interesting group and they reminded me of a lot of things I knew but had let slide to the back of my mind. Widowers who only began to explore their true natures after the death of their wives, some of them living in small rural communities where the role of grieving widower is more acceptable than born again gay! They're unsurprisingly suspicious of the "freedoms" LGBT people enjoy in this country- it makes little difference if your neighbours find out your 'one of them' and decide to make your life a misery. One was a trans woman who attends bingo with her wife and most people have 'accepted' it to the point where they at least ignore it. But she spoke of a particular individual who goes out of her way to use male pronouns etc in a clearly vindictive way. The group member said she didn't understand why, after all she never mentions the fact that this bully is fat. The general feeling was that the freedoms we talked about don't really apply to older LGBT people- which is a shocking perception when you realise that it was their generations who did the ground-work for what we experience today.

They're keen to be involved in the project and we arranged to come back in February (LGBT History Month) to do an afternoon of activities and interviews that should be fun as well as ensuring we have a Durham perspective to the archive. They also complained that Durham may be a picturesque tourist attraction, but that there is very little to disrupt the isolation they experience. We went away discussing developing some social events as a pilot to offer regular activities for them. One of our other clients has the remit to deliver LGBT work in Durham, but the scope of their current work exceeds their current capacity several times over. It is a little frustrating to be constrained by our relationship with a client who is unable to fulfil their own remit! I hope to arrange a meeting with them soon with the aim of agreeing what can be joint activities or even things that they will allow us to pursue on our own.